Actually, most alarm systems have battery backup. If the power goes out they phone home immediately using that. AU ACMA requirements say:
Line-powered CE The current drawn by CE when connected to a source of-- (a) 100 V d.c. ; and (b) 50 V d.c. shall not exceed that which would be drawn by 1 M resistor replacing the CE. This requirement applies 30 seconds after voltage has been applied. Note: On some carrier network equipment, CSS and other CE, the nominal OFF-LINE feedbridge voltage may be as low as 24 V.
That's not a lot of power, especially to run PIRs, screamers etc, in offline mode that's not enough to keep the chip in a phone alive (Telstra touchfone 200) to keep the numbers stored (They weren't saved in flash for some unknown reason). Even these old POSs still cause ISPs grief to this day due to the load they put on the line when they go online to keep power in capacitance which causes modems / DSL routers to drop out.
I'm not mistaking the understanding for them saying that they are redundant (I know what their version of redundant is, I know what mine is too), what I'm saying is that he is mistaken when he claims the phone network is redundant. It's not. Most fibre installs I have seen (Including home installs) have had 8 - 12 hours of backup power. I haven't seen a power outage in Sydney last longer than that for a very long time. (Once in my growing up there, a transformer at the local power station caught fire and blew up)
This has to be one of the most bullshit statements I've had the displeasure of reading.
There is two things wrong with this, the POTS copper system ISN'T redundant, they have a single pair of copper going onto a single card in an exchange (CO). They do have an SLA that they have to have 99.99% uptime, and if Telstra / Optus / whoever don't keep the copper line up they get fined by the government (ACA?). Secondly, ANYONE who wants redundancy can get a GSM mobile / copper wire system. A LOT of businesses have to replace their alarm systems every two or three years for insurance reasons (The insurance companies sometimes even pay for the upgrade) and a number of businesses already have this setup. If they have to go to NBN eventually (The copper system isn't dissapearing anytime soon) they will have a copper to VoIP setup with a GSM backup, it's not exactly hard.
There is so much inertia behind the copper system that it will take a LONG time to decomission, (50 years?) I don't see the reason why they would have to upgrade anything immediately.
Yes, there is medical requirements and a lot of dependency on the existing setup, but the new network won't be finished for 10 years, let alone the old one being decomissioned....
Live on the Northern Beaches? I did, used to live near Warringah (Which was the council that was tossed out, known to be heavily corrupt and enough to the residents whinged to state government to get them out), the funny thing was that the administrator that they put in was more effective than the local council. The administrator started effectively communicating with the local communinity by taking space in The Manly Daily and he (Or probably one of his administration) would write up a letter each week saying what was going on, issues raised and how the council was fixing it.
What I heard was that elections took place (I wasn't there), but the administrator said something in the Manly Daily along the lines of : 'Please don't cock up the voting, do it properly so I can go back to my old job, it's what I want to do, not this, I'm tired and have had enough'. What happened? Everyone cocked up the vote because everyone knew he was more effective than anyone we would get as a local politician.
Since the administrator got replaced, I haven't asked about local politics given that I'm not there to worry about it.
For the 64 gig support on a 32 bit machine you often need special servers with chipsets that bank the memory appropriately and special system drivers (Serverworks is/was famous for this) on top of that
Sorta, you could go to 8, 12, 16 or 32 with modern motherboards and available RAM (Well above 4GB) but that doesn't help the situation.
its really only something you need to do if you were running Metaframe
*cough* What?!?!? After databases needed the RAM (They brought in PAE with the Pentium Pro) then the next problem was Metaframe. Metaframe was NT4.0 TSE era. Having 20 users login to a system was a great way to burn up RAM on a single host.
Metaframe is one of the biggest drivers of 64bit systems as you can now get more users on a box WITHOUT the overhead of virtualisation (A lot of people still run XenApp on Windows on a hypervisor as it gives a few benefits in regards to CPU scheduling etc)
My understand is the reason for this is just special hardware/driver support
Nope.
many consumer motherboards for instance map real world pci resources in the 4 gig address range
It's the drivers that do this so that the operating system can address this memory as it's a 32bit app
You try accessing more than 2GB of RAM (or 3GB of RAM with the/3GB switch in boot.ini) in a single process. What you end up having to do is (firstly) your own memory management (Which sucks) and having to manage multiple 2GB "windows" so if you want to read data you have to swap in an out of these "windows" to be able to read them as the kernel itself is only 32bit and can only directly address 4GB of RAM.
So you end up coding in what is known in Windows as "Addressable Window Extensions" and they are a pain in the arse. Doing this on SQL server and Oracle was basically a necessity, and when PAE was first thought of, this is exactly what was being thought about, database systems. They have been able to use PAE in VMware etc and other places as they give the upper and lower limits for memory address directly to the operating system (Windows, Linux whatever else is actually running in the VM) and then they address via the hypervisor that memory address space, meaning that the hypervisor doesn't have to do a lot of memory management (Certainly nothing like protected memory)
So in effect, the biggest reason for 32bit Windows 7 not supporting more than 4GB of RAM is because the kernel itself is a 32bit app and doesn't have the 64bit address space to directly address more than 4GB of RAM itself.
In the long term it's just too hard, and it's easier to code for 64bit than to deal with what are effectively kludges to make this work.
If you need to know more about this, I would suggest Mark Russinovich's Windows Internals book.
Your description is correct, but your theory is wrong. It's triangulation as cell towers have multiple antenna / masts. Each side of the base station / cell tower is directional and therefore has a corresponding frequency so that they can re-use frequency more readily within the area of the network. This does make it triangulation, as based upon the frequency which you are using to talk to to the cell tower, that gives you your direction (Roughly). Your signal stregnth then gives you (vague) distance, doing this between more cells gives you your location.
Everyone I knew back in Aus had their friendly neighbourhood geek (Or asked the IT guys at work) who would tell them who to sign up with and what plan to get. As part of this, they usually went out and bought a decent ADSL router instead of what came in the box. It was usually described as "What's in the box will get you going, but this is what you really want".
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I didn't know anyone who used the modem that came in the box (Except one or two business customers who had to as the modem was considered CPE by the provider)
Why not? There is enough government contracts and other stuff all over the world. You would end up being the size of MS to do it, but given enough time, it's plausible. As long as you don't screw up majorly and keep most of your customers happy, there is no reason why this couldn't happen.
Every company your talking about seems to have another business, hardware or otherwise which they derive profits from. Yes, IBM sells services for open source, they also have a HUGE mainframe business and.... actually... nope, I can't think of one industry they don't have a foot in from some angle. Intel is involved with open source, but then again, their biggest money spinner is x86 chips. Xerox makes photocopiers and printers.
Travel time, from my work to the Google office, about 10 mins. Travel time from my house when I was in London to the Google office about 20 mins. Travel time from most places I have worked to a Google engineering / sales office, less than 20 mins. It's not THAT much of a burden.
Just to follow your logic, when you go to your bank branch, do they pay you for travel and related costs? Ah, thought so.
I don't disagree with what the devs are doing, in fact I fully support it, it's an open source product, you're getting benefit from it, submit your driver. Unfortunately, for someone like Nvidia, it doesn't work that well because of the amount of work arounds that they are doing in the driver. They would also end up maintaining a tree and be under someone else's release schedule, as well as a few other drawbacks that I just don't think they would go for....
MODS: Why was the parent modded troll? +1 informative pls
The biggest reason why everyone froze their kernels for a major release and back ported was the create what was effectively a driver binary interface. So if a hardware vendor (Yes, I'm looking at you Nvidia) wanted to create a binary driver release for a codebase, that driver release would work for the whole period of support for that codebase. This is because Linux doesn't have a driver ABI.
So getting back to what Novell have done here...It's a hard one, I guess, if they spoke to their ISVs and they said they don't care, then it doesn't matter. If HP / Dell / Lenovo don't care either then, again, that's no problem.
I guess there is always going to be someone out there who hasn't qualified their drivers with Novell for SLES 11 and just does self certification and was expecting their release to keep working (Which was tested against the earlier release) and now has to upgrade their driver because the Linux ABI is a rapidly moving target. On the other hand, a lot of people rely on on Novell / RedHat etc for driver support and don't go back to Dell / HP / Lenovo; if there is problems they point fingers at their Linux vendor first.
Time will tell if this was a good idea or not. Personally, I'm not against it, more hardware support out of the box is better for me, if I run into a problem and have to run older hardware on an older kernel and just upgrade RPMs on my older systems then so be it. I guess that's what versioning in builds is for really isn't it?
Well, Intel tried ramping up the Mhz to try to compensate for the longer pipeline, and then tried to claim that they were faster. AMD just printed a larger number on the box without increasing the Mhz of the core. Yes, in a lot of instances AMD were faster, however, when someone who hasn't read the benchmarks goes to buy a computer they look at the numbers and if they see Athlon 3400 and a P4 3200 they are going to presume that the Athlon is faster because it's got a larger number. Hence, they got out marketed by AMD.
IIRC, Intel got their head handed to them by AMD when they "lost" the Mhz race to AMDs Marketing dept.
Intel with the P4 had a very long pipeline which they could crank the speed of faster than what AMD could. On the other hand, AMD went for multiple shorter pipelines though the CPU which meant that most of what people did went through the CPU faster. (I am purposefully skipping over cache misses, delays on getting things through the pipeline etc) The benchmarks at the time proved it. Also, the addition of the on-die memory controller and Hyper Transport meant that AMD's memory bandwidth was a lot faster.
After this, when Intel realised that the longer pipeline was killing them, and they went down the road of wide order execution, same as AMD. To do this, they effectively dropped the long pipeline of the P4 series and went back and re-developed a new core from the Pentium III train.
At least they admitted they fucked up and fixed it, they would be dead by now if they hadn't.
Just took a look at the paperwork, your right, I had accounted for the timezone difference, but what I was looking at was the wrong time. I was looking at my next outbound which was 11:29 not the arrival at 10:35. Whoops, my bad.
You can get a ticket now because all the planes are in the sky again. You are correct, Eurostar doesn't over subscribe.
And I heard from several people (though I had no reason to check myself) that the Eurostar wasn't booked during the no fly days, either.
Seriously misinformed there. They were absolutely solid till Wed. Most people were waiting 2 to 3 days from when they bought a ticket (This is Thurs -> Sun) till when they got on a train. The only way to get a ticket shorter than 2 days was to go business class, and even you had to book 24 - 30 hours in advance. There were 200 people waiting in line at Frankfurt Main this time last week. Forgetting who was trying to get back to the UK from the rest of Europe too.
Not to say that what Eurostar managed to do wasn't great, it was. All trains left on time and their booking system didn't melt. They made a killing and they deserved it, they were working and nobody else was.
Umm, a couple of faults with your plan. (I was in Frankfurt as well)
Eurostar doesn't run from Frankfurt. Try Brussels or Paris. It takes longer, it takes 3 hours just to get to Brussels (And getting the ICE to Brussels to get the Eurostar to London is faster than going through Paris). ICE / TGV / Eurostar run at about 250 km/h so there is no way that they can get there in an hour and a half.
Eurostar was 320 because it's short notice, you can get it for 50, but at an inconvenient time with 6 weeks notice. The ICE to Brussels was 160 (I think). All told I ended up paying about 550 - 600 to get to Dublin and it took me 24 hours. Getting tickets to get into France wasn't a problem, getting Eurostar tickets was difficult, I got the last ticket for my train on Monday. Most people were waiting 3+ days to get a seat on the Eurostar. By the time that they had dealt with a lot of back log the planes were in the sky again.
Really, it was a stupid remark and it proves you weren't there / haven't been travelling in that area. Especially if you haven't been travelling there, it can be quite daunting trying to figure out how / when and where.
Another aussie comment, yes, they do it. The moment the light turns orange a speed camera turns on and if you are above the speed limit when it catches you, it takes your pictures and notes the speed.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, most alarm systems have battery backup. If the power goes out they phone home immediately using that. AU ACMA requirements say:
Line-powered CE
The current drawn by CE when connected to a source of--
(a) 100 V d.c. ; and
(b) 50 V d.c.
shall not exceed that which would be drawn by 1 M resistor replacing the CE. This requirement applies 30 seconds after voltage has been applied.
Note: On some carrier network equipment, CSS and other CE, the nominal OFF-LINE feedbridge voltage may be as low as 24 V.
That's not a lot of power, especially to run PIRs, screamers etc, in offline mode that's not enough to keep the chip in a phone alive (Telstra touchfone 200) to keep the numbers stored (They weren't saved in flash for some unknown reason). Even these old POSs still cause ISPs grief to this day due to the load they put on the line when they go online to keep power in capacitance which causes modems / DSL routers to drop out.
I'm not mistaking the understanding for them saying that they are redundant (I know what their version of redundant is, I know what mine is too), what I'm saying is that he is mistaken when he claims the phone network is redundant. It's not. Most fibre installs I have seen (Including home installs) have had 8 - 12 hours of backup power. I haven't seen a power outage in Sydney last longer than that for a very long time. (Once in my growing up there, a transformer at the local power station caught fire and blew up)
This has to be one of the most bullshit statements I've had the displeasure of reading.
There is two things wrong with this, the POTS copper system ISN'T redundant, they have a single pair of copper going onto a single card in an exchange (CO). They do have an SLA that they have to have 99.99% uptime, and if Telstra / Optus / whoever don't keep the copper line up they get fined by the government (ACA?). Secondly, ANYONE who wants redundancy can get a GSM mobile / copper wire system. A LOT of businesses have to replace their alarm systems every two or three years for insurance reasons (The insurance companies sometimes even pay for the upgrade) and a number of businesses already have this setup. If they have to go to NBN eventually (The copper system isn't dissapearing anytime soon) they will have a copper to VoIP setup with a GSM backup, it's not exactly hard.
There is so much inertia behind the copper system that it will take a LONG time to decomission, (50 years?) I don't see the reason why they would have to upgrade anything immediately.
Yes, there is medical requirements and a lot of dependency on the existing setup, but the new network won't be finished for 10 years, let alone the old one being decomissioned....
Berny
And me without mod points... *MODS!*
Live on the Northern Beaches? I did, used to live near Warringah (Which was the council that was tossed out, known to be heavily corrupt and enough to the residents whinged to state government to get them out), the funny thing was that the administrator that they put in was more effective than the local council. The administrator started effectively communicating with the local communinity by taking space in The Manly Daily and he (Or probably one of his administration) would write up a letter each week saying what was going on, issues raised and how the council was fixing it.
What I heard was that elections took place (I wasn't there), but the administrator said something in the Manly Daily along the lines of : 'Please don't cock up the voting, do it properly so I can go back to my old job, it's what I want to do, not this, I'm tired and have had enough'. What happened? Everyone cocked up the vote because everyone knew he was more effective than anyone we would get as a local politician.
Since the administrator got replaced, I haven't asked about local politics given that I'm not there to worry about it.
For the 64 gig support on a 32 bit machine you often need special servers with chipsets that bank the memory appropriately and special system drivers (Serverworks is/was famous for this) on top of that
Sorta, you could go to 8, 12, 16 or 32 with modern motherboards and available RAM (Well above 4GB) but that doesn't help the situation.
its really only something you need to do if you were running Metaframe
*cough* What?!?!? After databases needed the RAM (They brought in PAE with the Pentium Pro) then the next problem was Metaframe. Metaframe was NT4.0 TSE era. Having 20 users login to a system was a great way to burn up RAM on a single host. Metaframe is one of the biggest drivers of 64bit systems as you can now get more users on a box WITHOUT the overhead of virtualisation (A lot of people still run XenApp on Windows on a hypervisor as it gives a few benefits in regards to CPU scheduling etc)
My understand is the reason for this is just special hardware/driver support
Nope.
many consumer motherboards for instance map real world pci resources in the 4 gig address range
It's the drivers that do this so that the operating system can address this memory as it's a 32bit app
You try accessing more than 2GB of RAM (or 3GB of RAM with the /3GB switch in boot.ini) in a single process. What you end up having to do is (firstly) your own memory management (Which sucks) and having to manage multiple 2GB "windows" so if you want to read data you have to swap in an out of these "windows" to be able to read them as the kernel itself is only 32bit and can only directly address 4GB of RAM.
So you end up coding in what is known in Windows as "Addressable Window Extensions" and they are a pain in the arse. Doing this on SQL server and Oracle was basically a necessity, and when PAE was first thought of, this is exactly what was being thought about, database systems. They have been able to use PAE in VMware etc and other places as they give the upper and lower limits for memory address directly to the operating system (Windows, Linux whatever else is actually running in the VM) and then they address via the hypervisor that memory address space, meaning that the hypervisor doesn't have to do a lot of memory management (Certainly nothing like protected memory)
So in effect, the biggest reason for 32bit Windows 7 not supporting more than 4GB of RAM is because the kernel itself is a 32bit app and doesn't have the 64bit address space to directly address more than 4GB of RAM itself.
In the long term it's just too hard, and it's easier to code for 64bit than to deal with what are effectively kludges to make this work.
If you need to know more about this, I would suggest Mark Russinovich's Windows Internals book.
Your description is correct, but your theory is wrong. It's triangulation as cell towers have multiple antenna / masts. Each side of the base station / cell tower is directional and therefore has a corresponding frequency so that they can re-use frequency more readily within the area of the network. This does make it triangulation, as based upon the frequency which you are using to talk to to the cell tower, that gives you your direction (Roughly). Your signal stregnth then gives you (vague) distance, doing this between more cells gives you your location.
If only they had done that the first time......
There is just as much stuff about the UK as what there is about Aus...
Everyone I knew back in Aus had their friendly neighbourhood geek (Or asked the IT guys at work) who would tell them who to sign up with and what plan to get. As part of this, they usually went out and bought a decent ADSL router instead of what came in the box. It was usually described as "What's in the box will get you going, but this is what you really want".
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I didn't know anyone who used the modem that came in the box (Except one or two business customers who had to as the modem was considered CPE by the provider)
Anyone else experience anything different?
Apparently the Australians hung up when they heard the indian accent....
Why not? There is enough government contracts and other stuff all over the world. You would end up being the size of MS to do it, but given enough time, it's plausible. As long as you don't screw up majorly and keep most of your customers happy, there is no reason why this couldn't happen.
Every company your talking about seems to have another business, hardware or otherwise which they derive profits from. Yes, IBM sells services for open source, they also have a HUGE mainframe business and.... actually... nope, I can't think of one industry they don't have a foot in from some angle. Intel is involved with open source, but then again, their biggest money spinner is x86 chips. Xerox makes photocopiers and printers.
Travel time, from my work to the Google office, about 10 mins. Travel time from my house when I was in London to the Google office about 20 mins. Travel time from most places I have worked to a Google engineering / sales office, less than 20 mins. It's not THAT much of a burden.
Just to follow your logic, when you go to your bank branch, do they pay you for travel and related costs? Ah, thought so.
Stand outside a Google office with a sign for 10 mins outta do the trick!
I don't disagree with what the devs are doing, in fact I fully support it, it's an open source product, you're getting benefit from it, submit your driver. Unfortunately, for someone like Nvidia, it doesn't work that well because of the amount of work arounds that they are doing in the driver. They would also end up maintaining a tree and be under someone else's release schedule, as well as a few other drawbacks that I just don't think they would go for....
MODS: Why was the parent modded troll? +1 informative pls
The biggest reason why everyone froze their kernels for a major release and back ported was the create what was effectively a driver binary interface. So if a hardware vendor (Yes, I'm looking at you Nvidia) wanted to create a binary driver release for a codebase, that driver release would work for the whole period of support for that codebase. This is because Linux doesn't have a driver ABI.
So getting back to what Novell have done here...It's a hard one, I guess, if they spoke to their ISVs and they said they don't care, then it doesn't matter. If HP / Dell / Lenovo don't care either then, again, that's no problem.
I guess there is always going to be someone out there who hasn't qualified their drivers with Novell for SLES 11 and just does self certification and was expecting their release to keep working (Which was tested against the earlier release) and now has to upgrade their driver because the Linux ABI is a rapidly moving target. On the other hand, a lot of people rely on on Novell / RedHat etc for driver support and don't go back to Dell / HP / Lenovo; if there is problems they point fingers at their Linux vendor first.
Time will tell if this was a good idea or not. Personally, I'm not against it, more hardware support out of the box is better for me, if I run into a problem and have to run older hardware on an older kernel and just upgrade RPMs on my older systems then so be it. I guess that's what versioning in builds is for really isn't it?
Berny
Well, Intel tried ramping up the Mhz to try to compensate for the longer pipeline, and then tried to claim that they were faster. AMD just printed a larger number on the box without increasing the Mhz of the core. Yes, in a lot of instances AMD were faster, however, when someone who hasn't read the benchmarks goes to buy a computer they look at the numbers and if they see Athlon 3400 and a P4 3200 they are going to presume that the Athlon is faster because it's got a larger number. Hence, they got out marketed by AMD.
IIRC, Intel got their head handed to them by AMD when they "lost" the Mhz race to AMDs Marketing dept.
Intel with the P4 had a very long pipeline which they could crank the speed of faster than what AMD could. On the other hand, AMD went for multiple shorter pipelines though the CPU which meant that most of what people did went through the CPU faster. (I am purposefully skipping over cache misses, delays on getting things through the pipeline etc) The benchmarks at the time proved it. Also, the addition of the on-die memory controller and Hyper Transport meant that AMD's memory bandwidth was a lot faster.
After this, when Intel realised that the longer pipeline was killing them, and they went down the road of wide order execution, same as AMD. To do this, they effectively dropped the long pipeline of the P4 series and went back and re-developed a new core from the Pentium III train.
At least they admitted they fucked up and fixed it, they would be dead by now if they hadn't.
Just took a look at the paperwork, your right, I had accounted for the timezone difference, but what I was looking at was the wrong time. I was looking at my next outbound which was 11:29 not the arrival at 10:35. Whoops, my bad.
You can get a ticket now because all the planes are in the sky again. You are correct, Eurostar doesn't over subscribe.
And I heard from several people (though I had no reason to check myself) that the Eurostar wasn't booked during the no fly days, either.
Seriously misinformed there. They were absolutely solid till Wed. Most people were waiting 2 to 3 days from when they bought a ticket (This is Thurs -> Sun) till when they got on a train. The only way to get a ticket shorter than 2 days was to go business class, and even you had to book 24 - 30 hours in advance. There were 200 people waiting in line at Frankfurt Main this time last week. Forgetting who was trying to get back to the UK from the rest of Europe too.
Not to say that what Eurostar managed to do wasn't great, it was. All trains left on time and their booking system didn't melt. They made a killing and they deserved it, they were working and nobody else was.
Umm, a couple of faults with your plan.
(I was in Frankfurt as well)
Eurostar doesn't run from Frankfurt. Try Brussels or Paris. It takes longer, it takes 3 hours just to get to Brussels (And getting the ICE to Brussels to get the Eurostar to London is faster than going through Paris). ICE / TGV / Eurostar run at about 250 km/h so there is no way that they can get there in an hour and a half.
Eurostar was 320 because it's short notice, you can get it for 50, but at an inconvenient time with 6 weeks notice. The ICE to Brussels was 160 (I think). All told I ended up paying about 550 - 600 to get to Dublin and it took me 24 hours. Getting tickets to get into France wasn't a problem, getting Eurostar tickets was difficult, I got the last ticket for my train on Monday. Most people were waiting 3+ days to get a seat on the Eurostar. By the time that they had dealt with a lot of back log the planes were in the sky again.
Really, it was a stupid remark and it proves you weren't there / haven't been travelling in that area. Especially if you haven't been travelling there, it can be quite daunting trying to figure out how / when and where.
Another aussie comment, yes, they do it. The moment the light turns orange a speed camera turns on and if you are above the speed limit when it catches you, it takes your pictures and notes the speed.
that was supposed to be trekies, that's what you get for posting near midnight without thinking....